First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life

by Joe Moran

For James Baldwin, the one true goal was “to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”

Concrete nouns form pictures in our minds and evoke what can be felt, smelled, touched or tasted. The more particularizing a noun is—the more it calls to mind the noise, touch and tang of life—the closer it brings us to the world.

When nouns rule over sentences, all the air has been punched out of them. Emptied of life and humanity, they have been refilled with inertia and nothingness. All the imaginative promise of words has been pulped into a lumpy noun gravy, neither liquid enough to flow nor solid enough to be forked. This noun gravy is tasteless but, should we swallow enough of it, noxious.

Turn weak verb–noun phrases into verbs. Puts emphasis on: emphasizes. Gives the impression: suggests. Draws attention to: notes. Turn other parts of speech into verbs. Verbs born of adjectives—we dim lights, tame hair, muddy prose—can be especially cinematic.

I say all this is simple, but tying noun phrases together with weak verbal knots is simple. Adding strong verbs is hard. A sentence should be a labor to write, not to read. Nouny sentences are the reverse: a labor to read, a breeze to write. Those who write them assume that, just by gumming nouns together, they have communicated with other human beings. All they have achieved is a lazy, bogus fluency.

In his book Barbarian Days, on his life as a surfer, William Finnegan writes that the aesthetics of surfing are about how nonchalantly you solve the problem each wave presents. The surfer styles it out by making it all look natural, when every branch of physics is screaming at him to fall over. He must stay elegantly upright while climbing the wall of a wave and dancing along it and then, before it breaks, he must handle the pullout as if it were a perfectly placed full stop. “Casual power, the proverbial grace under pressure, these were our beau ideals,” Finnegan writes. “Pull into a heaving barrel, come out cleanly. Act like you’ve been there before.”

Academic writing’s clankiest sounds come from its -tate verbs, like necessitate and facilitate, and its -shun nouns, like evaluation and function. The critic Richard Lanham calls such writing “mumblespeak” because the sounds are insufficiently distinct and you hear them as muffled noise-making. You can do a global search for -tate and -shun endings in your writing and cull them. But the quickest cure for mumblespeak is shorter words.

Flat adverbs add a sharp, stressed syllable to the end of a clause. Chop it up small. The moon shone bright. I did it wrong.

The aim, in the plain style as in all styles, is to make something disordered and random feel measured and deliberate. Choosing the right words is difficult, and our first efforts always sound gauche and try-too-hard. “What is style?” asks Barthes in an essay on sport. “Style makes a difficult action into a graceful gesture, introduces a rhythm into fatality. Style is to be courageous without disorder, to give necessity the appearance of freedom.” Writing gives necessity the appearance of freedom when the words no longer look as if they are laboring to belong. For an adjective or adverb to belong, it must obey this iron law: the right word is only the right word in the right place.

Tyndale’s prose is not so much clear as memorable, and memorability is worth more in a sentence even than clarity. Or rather it is the best kind of clarity. The plain English style is just words worked into memorable forms that we define, post hoc, as clear, because they stay in our heads long enough to be understood. The lesson of all this is plain. If you have something weird or astonishing or heterodox to say—if you want to stretch the confines of the credible and be true to the world in all its beautiful, brain-melting absurdity, which you should want to do—then say it with the plainest words and in the plainest order you can find.

Think of a long sentence as a poem and it will always be clear because each part of it will unravel in little musical phrases, with all the different parts coloring one another without it ever feeling discordant.

Short and long sentences do different things. Short sentences make key points or recap them, and trade in swift action, jokes and little swerves in thought. Long ones take readers on a mental tour, offer a rambling inventory or knead and stretch out a thought like a pizza chef working dough. Short sentences give your brain a rest; long ones give it an aerobic workout. Short sentences imply that the world is cut and dried; long ones restore its ragged edges. Short sentences are declarative and sure; long ones are conditional and conjectural.

White space is welcoming. It breaks up the page, gives the words air and light and ushers the reader in. By some unfathomable alchemy, writing that looks good on the page, with none of the paragraphs too long or puddingy-looking, has a habit of also reading well.

When your writing has a voice, you are no longer cornering and badgering the reader with a jerry-built argument. Instead the argument arises out of the act of noticing something about the world from one tiny spot on it—the one occupied by the writer—and sharing it with the reader. This, it says, is what life looks like from here.